Suppose there was a Republican president who never showed any passion for limiting government but resented it when people on the public payroll undermined his agenda. Suppose he found a more ideological warrior, a man sometimes known to quote hardcore free market libertarians, and told him to blow up a nest of bureaucratic foes. Suppose that appointee took to the job with gusto, convinced that he had an opportunity both to roll back the administrative state and to defund the radical left. Suppose the bureaucracy threw everything it could at this new arrival, while critics raised constitutional questions about the way he went about his mission. Suppose the executioner was gone from his post by the summer. Suppose the barely bruised bureaucracy kept lumbering on.

That may sound like the story of President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the agencies targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But the president I have in mind was Richard Nixon, the appointee was Howard Phillips, and the institution that Phillips was sent to destroy was the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). And if the two tales did not play out exactly the same way, the similarities are strong. This is what can happen when the idea of rolling back state power tries to merge with the urge to purge.

'Does the President Know He's Putting M-O-N-E-Y in the Hands of Subversives?'

One surefire way to annoy a president is to give government cash to people protesting or suing his administration. That's true whether the president is Donald Trump, Richard Nixon, or even Lyndon Johnson, the man who signed the bill that got a lot of that money rolling.

The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 was at the core of Johnson's War on Poverty: a law that launched everything from the Head Start preschool program to the Job Corps, plus a new federal agency—the OEO—tasked with coordinating those efforts. One of the office's missions was to fund Community Action Agencies (CAAs) across the country, which were supposed to deliver services, improve conditions, or otherwise lift people out of poverty. It was this Community Action Program—along with the Legal Services Program, which OEO opened a year later to give poor people legal advice and representation—that got under Nixon's skin.

Under the Economic Opportunity Act, the CAAs were required to operate with the "maximum feasible participation" of the poor themselves. This was not necessarily intended as a recipe for radical democratic experiments. In Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, his 1969 account of the program's origins and early days, Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the legislation's authors had meant participation in the program's benefits, not in devising or running the programs. But there were ideas in the air that made it easier to interpret the phrase more broadly. Many people in the foundation world had been reading communitarian localists like Robert Nisbet and Paul Goodman—the former a conservative and the latter a New Leftist, but both very skeptical of centralized, bureaucratic institutions. As a result, Moynihan wrote, it was possible for a Ford Foundation project to reflect both a "shaggy, inexact communitarian anarchism of the Paul Goodman variety" and a "shiny, no nonsense, city-as-a-system, Robert S. McNamara style" without anyone seeming to notice the tension.

This drama had already played out in miniature shortly before the OEO was born, when one of the Ford Foundation's grantees—a New York–based nonprofit called Mobilization for Youth, funded in part by public money and ostensibly devoted to fighting juvenile delinquency—started organizing rent strikes, school boycotts, and other militant protests. Imagine the same ingredients being dropped into dozens of cities on the government's dime, and you can see why some people would be alarmed.

Not that everyone on the OEO payroll was a radical, or even an ordinary middle-of-the-road community volunteer. Despite those magic words "maximum feasible participation," it was not uncommon for officials just to pretend to listen to the locals before doing whatever they intended to do anyway. In a famous 1969 article, "A Ladder of Citizen Participation," Sherry Arnstein described how neighborhood groups would be invited to rubberstamp plans for, say, "a multiservice center which will house, under one roof, doctors from the health department, workers from the welfare department, and specialists from the employment service." The locals, she elaborated, would not be told "that the $2 million-per-year center will only refer residents to the same old waiting lines at the same old agencies across town. No one is asked if such a referral center is really needed in his neighborhood. No one realizes that the contractor for the building is the mayor's brother-in-law." The CAAs and similar efforts, Arnstein argued, were far more likely to yield this sort of manipulation, or to veer into therapy or tokenism, than to build real citizen power.

"Some of the more sophisticated poverty planners believe that the involvement of the poor is essential," the New Left leader Tom Hayden wrote disdainfully in 1966, citing OEO chief Sargent Shriver's belief that "advice" from "neighborhood advisory organizations" can be "channeled" to the appropriate authorities. For Hayden, who at that point was heavily involved in community activism in Newark, New Jersey, this barely masked a fundamentally imperial relationship, with ghetto residents ruled by "police, social agencies, and a cultivated group of colonized natives."

That last flourish—colonized natives—didn't come from nowhere: There was considerable interplay between the domestic welfare state and the international development agencies. (Shriver himself had commanded the Peace Corps before he came home to launch the OEO.) Those international efforts drew criticisms from across the political spectrum, with figures on the right sometimes sounding similar to Hayden. The conservative writer Charles Murray opened his 1988 book In Pursuit with an account of his time in Thailand two decades earlier, when Washington was funding rural development to try to win peasants' loyalties away from a leftist insurgency. When he first came to the country, Murray had found himself entering villages "enjoined to 'consider the needs of the people' and 'encourage local participation,' much as change agents back in the States were calling for 'maximum feasible participation' in community development projects." But when Murray interviewed villagers about the projects, it became clear that the "participation" was window dressing. The villagers already had institutions that pursued projects that were important to them—"all the things that village headmen and committees (their committees, home-grown) did when the change agents weren't around." Unsurprisingly, the outsiders' efforts tended to bog down and not get much done.

At the same time, the very fact that our domestic CAAs were being erected outside the established local governments meant they could be a rival base of power—in the words of Shriver's deputy William Haddad, "competing institutions for the traditional services of government." And that made many mayors and other local officials nervous, especially when some of the money flowed to genuinely rambunctious activists. Hayden himself got involved with the very system he had been decrying: He saw Newark's CAA, the United Community Corporation, as a potential "government for the liberals"—that is, a source of cash that wasn't controlled by the local political machine. Other OEO funds made their way to everyone from welfare rights groups to the black nationalist Amiri Baraka's Black Arts Repertory Theatre. (And then there was one of the weirder political outliers of the 1960s: In Santa Clara County, California, a member of the John Birch Society got elected to the OEO's local antipoverty commission.)

With so many forces swirling around the Office of Economic Opportunity, a few of the agency's activities even attracted some sympathy from libertarians. The agency funded pilot experiments in school vouchers and the negative income tax, two reforms championed by the free market economist Milton Friedman, and it gave grants to community development corporations, which some libertarians of the day hoped could become a self-sustaining alternative to the welfare state. And while the Legal Services Program's lawsuits were more likely to call for expansions of government benefits, there were also suits to protect privacy rights and to block property seizures for urban renewal.

With government money going to people challenging the authorities, there was yet another potential problem: the possibility of co-option. The radical organizer Saul Alinsky, who disliked the War on Poverty and distrusted the OEO, complained at one point that he was watching a "vast network of sergeants drawing general's pay."

This was, in short, a volatile situation with something to alarm almost everyone. Democratic city leaders denounced the Community Action Program. (In his book The Promised Land, the journalist Nicholas Lemann described Chicago's powerful mayor Richard J. Daley calling the White House flunky Bill Moyers to vent. "Does the president know he's putting M-O-N-E-Y in the hands of subversives?" Daley demanded. "To poor people that aren't a part of the organization? Didn't the president know they'd take that money to bring him down?") By the end of 1965, Johnson's aide Joseph Califano was asking LBJ to dismantle the agency and move its less combustible functions to other arms of the government, and the president was tempted to take him up on it.

On the other side of the aisle, some Republicans were enjoying the show. Indeed, when Reps. Al Quie of Minnesota and Charles Goodell of New York put together a Republican alternative to the War on Poverty—they called it the Opportunity Crusade—their bill called for rolling back much of the new apparatus but increasing funding for the CAAs, as well as requiring that poor people get at least a third of the seats on local poverty boards. (Maximum feasible participation indeed.) That last part of the proposal passed.

But the more common reaction on the right was that the government had to put a stop to this—that taxpayers were funding not just a wasteful bureaucracy but sedition and subversion too. The conservative political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, seeing the violent unrest sweeping many American cities and fearing that more was on the way, complained in 1968 that he was watching "middle-class civil servants hire upper-class student radicals to use lower-class Negroes as a battering ram against the existing local political systems." Richard Nixon's first OEO chief, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed that when he first arrived at the office he saw Che Guevara posters on the walls.

Yet while Rumsfeld reshuffled the agency in various ways, neither he nor the next few folks to take the job tried to bring the whole operation to an end. The conservative columnist Joseph Alsop blamed this on a fear of riots—"They would have burned the place down if we'd terminated the programs just like that," he quoted one anonymous Nixon staffer as saying—though many of the new administration's appointees simply came from the liberal wing of the GOP. In the period between Nixon's election in late 1968 and his inauguration in early 1969, a wiseass put up a sign in an OEO elevator: "This building will self-destruct on January 20." That's not how the president's first term played out.

In his second term, Nixon reached for something more explosive. Howard Phillips was a young conservative from Massachusetts who had met Rumsfeld during Phillips' failed congressional campaign in 1970. Phillips refused Rumsfeld's initial invitation to work for him, but eventually he became an assistant to another OEO chief, Frank Carlucci. In that post, Phillips seethed as he watched the Community Action Program and the Legal Services Program give money to people he regarded as Marxists. And in January 1973, the freshly reinaugurated Richard Nixon named him acting head of the OEO and invited him to dismantle the agency.

The new boss's public image was established by a possibly apocryphal story that soon appeared in the press. One day in 1972, Phillips had allegedly told a colleague: "Every country needs its Cato, because every country has its Carthage. Well, I'm going to be this country's Cato. Carthage was destroyed because it was rotten. I think Legal Services is rotten, and it will be destroyed."

'He's Enjoying It Too Much'

As soon as he started the job, Phillips started firing people and ordering regional offices to shut down. "People would walk in the offices, and their file cabinets and desks would be gone," one veteran of the Legal Services system recalled in an oral history years later. On February 2, just a day before Phillips' 32nd birthday, a memo purportedly signed by the new director—but almost certainly a bit of xeroxlore composed by a disgruntled employee—started circulating through the agency. It announced that "a cease fire is hereby declared on the War on Poverty….Your Acting Director takes pride in making this a peace with honor."

Over the next few months, journalists and critics would call Phillips a "hatchet man" with an "intentionally abrasive style" who saw "strength only in the capability to destroy." In a more neutral register, Washington Post columnist David Broder wrote that the appointee was "a libertarian conservative, suspicious of all connections between the government and the public."

Was Phillips as radical as his reputation? To back up his description, Broder quoted a remark Phillips had made on the TV show Evening Edition: "I don't think it's proper for the government to be in a position of trying to solve the poverty problem through political means." This was a bit misleading: Just a few seconds later, Phillips had told the same audience that "government does have responsibility to see to it that the minimum needs of people are met," and earlier in the program he had touted a "tremendous increase that the president has made in human resources spending." But Broder had known the acting OEO director when Phillips was a junior staffer at the Republican National Committee, and he had heard the man attacking the welfare state in more candid terms back then. And while Phillips certainly wasn't a libertarian across the board—he was a stalwart social conservative who would eventually become a Christian Reconstructionist—his economic views were heavily influenced by such free market figures as Leonard Read and Hans Sennholz.

Above all, Phillips was a man of the right who didn't like to see Washington funding leftists. Looking back years later, when he no longer felt any pressure to watch his words, he called the OEO "an instrument for Marxist cultural revolution in America" that had been "promoting radical doctrines of equality, homosexuality, abortion, unionization of the armed forces, and much more." He wasn't that much more discreet when he was in office. ("I love Howie Phillips…but he needs to be a little more quiet," political strategist Harry Dent told the president in one White House meeting. "He's enjoying it too much.") "It's not appropriate, in my opinion, for federally funded people to use the subsidy which they receive as a jumping-off point for organizing rent strikes," Phillips said on Evening Edition. On another show, Thirty Minutes With…, he complained that grantees had said their "job is to educate the poor to their oppression, to radicalize the poor."

Nixon didn't disagree. Indeed, the longer he stayed in office, the more suspicious he was of the civil service in general. By the dawn of his second term, as Richard Reeves described it in President Nixon: Alone in the White House, Nixon "wanted to seize control of the government he believed was filled with time-serving incompetents and secret enemies. He was convinced that his orders were being ignored or subverted by bureaucrats in the State and Defense Departments, by Justice Department lawyers, by appointees at [the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare], by the FBI and the IRS, by liberal numbers collectors in the Bureau of Labor Statistics." He wanted to bring as much of the executive branch as possible under direct executive command. As for the OEO: Like Lyndon Johnson before him, Nixon didn't like to see people using federal money to challenge the federal government. (He was convinced the Community Action Program was inefficient too, declaring on one of the White House tapes that 85 percent of its money was going to bureaucrats and social workers rather than the poor.)

For all that, the administration was not, in fact, trying to destroy the entire OEO. Most of its programs were simply being moved to other parts of the government: a drug rehabilitation project would go to the National Institute of Mental Health, a farmworker project to the Labor Department, Head Start and the school-voucher experiment to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and so on. Phillips may have wanted to give Legal Services the Carthage treatment, but the plan for the moment was to replace the program with a new, congressionally chartered Legal Services Corporation. And the Community Action Agencies were to be handed over to state, local, and tribal governments, which would then have the choice of either maintaining or shuttering them. "Nothing we're doing prevents local officials from continuing Community Action from assigning resources in the end," Phillips noted on Thirty Minutes With…. But now, he argued, the programs would be "accountable to state and local officials."

If a new head of the OEO had said that eight years earlier, when mayors had been complaining to the White House about these rivals in their backyards, he might have been hailed as a hero in city halls across the land. But by 1973, a lot of local governments had learned to get along with their Community Action Agencies. The OEO had started pruning the most controversial grantees almost immediately—Amiri Baraka's subsidy had lasted less than a year—and many local authorities had figured out how to turn the CAAs into yet another sort of patronage, one that didn't even come out of their budgets. "Originally community action was viewed as the enemy of city hall," the radical journalist James Ridgeway wrote at the peak of the Phillips affair, "but those days are long gone, and many big city mayors view the programs as an appendage of their operations, functioning as a safety valve against riots."

One person to thank for that shift was none other than Richard Nixon. Because his first-term OEO chiefs had gone out of their way to shut down the most militant operations, state and local officials rebelled when Phillips tried to shut down the larger Community Action Program.

Needless to say, the Community Action Agencies themselves rebelled too. (In Nebraska, the deputy director of one CAA reacted to each edict from Phillips with a rubber stamp that said "BULLSHIT.") So did Phillips' foes in the executive branch, who leaked story after story to the press, including a memo in which the administration laid out its plans for steamrolling Congress. Congress itself was a source of opposition—not merely because some liberal legislators liked the OEO's activities but because there were genuine constitutional questions about the White House's efforts to impound the community agencies' money. If Congress had allocated this cash for the coming year, they asked, could the executive branch really refuse to spend it?

When Phillips testified before a House subcommittee at the end of February, all these tensions exploded. The legislators argued that Phillips was encroaching on Congress' powers, and in some cases they strenuously defended the agency Phillips was dismantling. One of the sharpest exchanges came when Rep. Frank Thompson (D–N.J.), grilling Phillips, raised the matter of OEO-funded legal services offices registering voters:

Phillips: It is prohibited by the Economic Opportunity Act, sir. I suggest you read it.

Thompson: I know it is. And I know that there have been violations. I applaud those violations.

Phillips: Sir, you have suggested that we have acted inconsistently with the law and have criticized us for it, and now you are suggesting you applaud violations of the law.

Thompson: I live by a double standard sometimes.

In April, District Judge William B. Jones stepped in to halt the demolition. If the executive branch could unilaterally terminate programs Congress had created and funded, he ruled, "no barrier would remain to the executive ignoring any and all Congressional authorizations." In June, Jones issued another ruling: Since Phillips himself had not been confirmed by Congress—Nixon had never bothered to send the Senate his name, on the grounds that the agency was closing anyway—the acting director had been "serving unlawfully and illegally in his position" and was "enjoined from taking any action" in the post. Unable to continue, Phillips resigned.

Later that summer, White House personnel chief Jerry Jones sent a memo to Chief of Staff Al Haig. Phillips, Jones said, had been "a willing volunteer on a kamikaze mission," and the administration owed him nothing. Nonetheless, the guy "has no outside income; he needs a job." And conservatives might complain if it looked like the president was abandoning their man. Alas: "In checking around the White House, I find that there is near unanimity of opinion that we ought to help him, but nobody wants him in their shop."

The fight over Legal Services dragged into the next year. Phillips had lobbied against the administration's blueprints for the new Legal Services Corporation, which he saw as little more than a modest revamp of the status quo; he preferred a revenue-sharing system that would let the states decide how the money would be spent. One of Nixon's closest advisers, John Ehrlichman, warned the president that this was a "doctrinaire conservative position" and that adopting it would mean "buying trouble that I just don't think you deserve." Phillips was left on the outside, feeding arguments to friendly congressmen and writing angry articles in Human Events.

The conservatives managed to add some limits on how the Legal Services Corporation's money would be spent—no abortion cases, no desegregation cases, no draft cases—but they could not stop the larger legislation that established the institution. Nixon signed the bill on July 25, 1974. A few days later, Phillips joined the chorus calling for the president's resignation.

By the end of the year, Phillips had left the GOP altogether. He became one of the founding fathers of the socially conservative New Right of the 1970s and '80s, got involved with an abortive attempt to turn the American Independent Party into a New Right vehicle, and eventually ran for president himself three times as the candidate of what is currently called the Constitution Party. Up until his death in 2013, one of Phillips' favorite slogans was "defund the left."

And the OEO? The year after Nixon resigned, the agency got a new name—the Community Services Administration. President Ronald Reagan formally abolished it in 1981, but even then it didn't really die: It became the Office of Community Services, which was housed in the Department of Health and Human Services rather than operating as an independent agency. In 2024 it had a budget of about $6.65 billion. In inflation-adjusted terms, that's about two-thirds of the OEO's budget in 1965.

Even that retrenchment isn't entirely real, since several projects that the OEO had been running in '65 were now housed in other arms of the government. In 1981, when a fresh-faced Republican senator from Indiana—future Vice President Dan Quayle—took to denouncing the Department of Education, Phillips wrote to warn him that any "proposal to merely dismantle it would, if successful, accomplish little." He was speaking from experience, Phillips explained: Several old OEO programs had "continued with more funding and less accountability elsewhere." The Phillips revolution had fully failed.

'A Viper's Nest of Radical-Left Marxists'

There are some notable differences between that tale and what has happened with DOGE. For one thing, Elon Musk famously does have an outside income and does not need a job. Because of that income, he faced conflict-of-interest accusations that weren't part of the picture with Phillips—love him or hate him, no one ever doubted that Howard Phillips was a true believer. The figure in the Trump administration with the closest ideological resemblance to Phillips is arguably not Musk but Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget and one of the authors of the famous Project 2025.

The biggest difference is that Musk and Vought bit off a much bigger task. No one ever suggested that dismantling the Office of Economic Opportunity would save the government $2 trillion. Conversely, their failure isn't quite as total: They did make genuine cuts to certain programs, with personnel reductions in some departments and with a rescissions bill revoking $9 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and other targets that Musk and Trump denounced in culture-war terms that Phillips would have loved. (Here's Musk on USAID: "a viper's nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.") That $9 billion is barely a tenth of 1 percent of the budget, and even those tiny savings are overwhelmed by the deficit boosts in this year's so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But they're more than Phillips managed.

At the same time, DOGE did some things that expanded rather than reduced federal power. By knocking down barriers to information sharing between government databases, it has extended the reach of the surveillance state. Phillips didn't do anything like that.

And of course, the DOGE saga isn't over yet. Vought is still around, though his shilling for the Big Beautiful Bill has tarnished his image as a budget hawk. DOGE itself isn't scheduled to expire until next July. We might see another rescissions package in 2026. The future is unwritten, and you never know what might happen.

But if current trends continue, the deficit will keep metastasizing and the executive branch will too, even if that expansion is happening in the Department of Homeland Security instead of the Agency for International Development. There are times when a president who wants a purge might be persuaded to try to eliminate an office rather than merely restaffing it. But as long as his larger commitment is to extending his power rather than rolling back power itself, you shouldn't expect the government to stop growing.

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